H. Edward Roberts, M.D., stands next to the first PC, the Altair 8800. (Source: ArsTechnica)

The Altair 8800b (Source: DVQ)

Roberts helped launch Microsoft and the career of Bill Gates, shown here in a much earlier photograph with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, when the pair were 13 year old students at Lakeside High (Source: Rensselaer)

Roberts helped launch the career of Bill Gates and Microsoft, delivered the first consumer PC

H.
Edward Roberts died this week at age 68. If you don't know the
story of how Roberts helped launch the personal computing revolution,
let us fill you in.

Back in 1970, Ed Roberts had just finished
serving at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory designing circuits for
missiles. Along with a close friend, Forrest M. Mims III, he
decided to open a business from his garage selling build-it-yourself
electronics kits to hobbyists.

The new company, MITS, sold its
first product, the MITS 816 calculator, in 1971 for $175 ($275
assembled). The calculator was featured in publications such
as Popular
Electronics and
proved a commercial hit. Several more models followed, and to
keep up with demand MITS moved to a new building with an assembly
line and commercial soldering equipment.

Then disaster struck
-- Texas Instruments in 1972 developed its own chip and began selling
calculators at half the price of the MITS models, fully assembled.
Even with $250,000 in debt and a collapsing business, Ed. Roberts
didn't waver from his commitment to personal computing. He
persevered building the prototype of the first personal computer, the
Altair 8800, named unofficially after a planet visited in the Star
Trek episode Amok
Time.

The
Altair 8800 saved the company. Ed. Roberts had brokered a deal
with Intel to buy Intel 8080 chips in bulk for $75/chip (normally
they were $360/chip). The cheap CPUs allowed the Altair 8800 to
retail for $439 ($621 assembled) at the time when Intel's Intellec-8
Microprocessor Development System, another Intel 8080 based system,
sold for $10,000.

The cheap Altair 8800 not only proved a mild
commercial hit, but it helped launch the world's biggest electronics
company today, Microsoft. In 1975 Bill
Gates and Paul
Allen, students at Harvard at the time read about the Altair.
They contacted Ed. Roberts telling him they were developing a
programming language interpreter and asking if he was interested in
purchasing in it.

The statement was a lie. The pair had
no interpreter in the works. But when Mr. Roberts expressed
interest they rented computer time and hurriedly threw together the
first version of BASIC, which fit on 4 kB of tape and supported
floating point math. They flew to Albuquerque, New Mexico to
demonstrate the program to Ed. Roberts. The first version only
printed "Altair Basic" and then crashed. However, a
second tape worked, printing Gates and Allen's company's new name
"Micro-soft" and running a short integer addition
program.

In mid 1976, the Altair 8800B launched and Gates and
Allen delivered 8K Altair Basic. Then came the feud between
Gates and Roberts which landed in the courts. The case centered
around Microsoft beginning to develop for the Motorola 6800 and other
devices, which MITS argued was contractually forbidden. Gates
countered that Roberts had not paid them in full and that the
contract had no such stipulations. Recalls Roberts,
"[Gates was] a very bright kid, but he was a constant headache
at MITS. You couldn’t reason with him. He did things
his way or not at all."

The case would be settled in
1980s in Microsoft's favor. However, by then Roberts had long
since left the computer industry behind. In 1977 he sold the
MITS company, which then had 230 employees for $6M USD. He kept
$2M USD of that sum and used it to purchase a farm in Georgia, which
he moved to with his wife and five sons.

The 6'4" former
Air Force officer turned computer pioneer turned farmer worked the
land for a few years, then decided to pursue his childhood dream of
becoming a physician. He succeeded at obtaining that degree.
In 1986 he was awarded a medical degree from Mercer University in
Macon and soon after opened a practice in Cochran, 35 miles
away.

The later years found Roberts in turbulent times, with
two divorces and two new marriages, starting with a divorce in 1988.
Roberts found strength and fulfillment in his medical career.
While he continued to tinker with electronics, he turned his back on
Silicon Valley, reportedly still hurt by the dispute with
Microsoft.

But as Roberts lay deathly ill in the hospital this
year, retired Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates reached out, spending
much time with his former employer-turned-nemesis. Last
Thursday Roberts passed away. He is survived by his third wife
Rosa Roberts, his five sons, and his daughter he had in 1983.
His role in launching the electronics industry -- and Microsoft --
will not be forgotten by those who know its story.

"So if you want to save the planet, feel free to drive your Hummer. Just avoid the drive thru line at McDonalds." -- Michael Asher